After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  He closed the orange felt album, took it to the bookshelf and slid it in. Then he drank a large glass of water and it came back up, just as clean as it went down.

  He didn’t know if it was at all appropriate, but he thought of the kid and boxed two small passion-fruit tarts. Then he unboxed them, thinking that having two small portions might highlight the fact that there were two tarts and not three, that someone was missing and so was his pudding. He put in a full-sized treacle tart, took it out – treacle was over-friendly. He settled at last on a strawberry cheesecake, which was special enough to be a gift and strawberry seemed like a fruit that would be universally appreciated, a fruit that no one could accuse him of being over-personal with. He laid slices of strawberry round the edges, was careful not to make too much of the centre of the tart, so that it didn’t seem like a celebratory cake but rather one that was meant for eating. He tied the box with a red ribbon, then cut it off and found a yellow one. The machete he wrapped in a pillowcase, then in brown paper. He put no ribbon on it – it wasn’t his gift to give.

  Outside the Crays’ house in Paddington he tried to settle his hands so they didn’t shake. He wouldn’t stay, not unless she wanted him to. He was sure she wouldn’t. But she might. She might want to talk about what he knew about Cray, what he had been like in those last weeks. He had prepared a speech in case she wanted to know how he’d died. He wouldn’t lie, but he wouldn’t tell everything, he wouldn’t tell how Cray had known he was going to die, had seen it coming over the tops of the trees, had died with no one touching him, just one man with a smashed knee watching it happen from across a clearing. In any case she might just ask him to go away.

  The house was pale pink with a large blooming jacaranda outside and he felt happy that he’d brought the right cake. There was a French-style balcony halfway up and on it a wooden rocking chair, still and solid. He watched it. He wondered if Lena still sat in it, if she spent the long summer evenings rocking their baby against her chest, if she listened to the flying foxes in the jacaranda tree and wondered about Cray and wondered what next?

  He shrugged his shoulders, trying to loosen his shirt collar as he stood at the front door. He knocked and somewhere inside he heard a baby crying. He exhaled long and hard, breathed in through his nose, knocked again, hoped he didn’t sound too impatient. Footsteps inside. He swallowed all he could, hoping an empty mouth would help him speak. The door opened a crack and a woman, older than he’d expected, looked out, her hair in curlers and a cigarette in her mouth.

  ‘Mrs Cray?’

  ‘No. What do you want?’

  ‘Is Mrs Cray in?’

  ‘Who are you?

  ‘I’m a friend of her husband’s.’

  The woman looked him up and down, not in a friendly way, but not either in an unfriendly way, just in a way that suggested she was very tired and wished he hadn’t come. The baby cried again. ‘Look. I’m sorry,’ she said, the howls inside distracting her. ‘Lena isn’t here. I’m her sister. Lena died.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She put her head in the oven after Paul. I’m sorry to be the bearer – I really am, but she left a baby behind and it’s crying, so if you don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He stepped back and the woman nodded and closed the door. Leon heard her footsteps getting fainter inside. He hadn’t known Cray’s first name was Paul.

  25

  As he neared the end of his track, Frank saw that something was wrong. The stove was tipped over on to its side, its legs in the air like an upturned beetle. An empty car was parked outside the shack and the front door was wide open. As he pulled up he saw the vegetable patch had been dug out, splints snapped in half, Sal’s careful chicken wire flattened.

  He got out of the truck and spat on the ground. What the fuck now? What else, possibly?

  He left the door to his truck open and moved quietly up the steps. Kirk, alone, warbled in a nearby tree.

  ‘Thanks a bunch, mate,’ he muttered.

  Inside was as much of a mess as his few possessions would allow. His bed was turned on its side, the fridge door hung open, the sugar figurines were upended, arms and legs turned to dust on the floor.

  His ears strained and his fists clenched at his sides. He looked around for something hefty to grab hold of, but there was nothing – the machete was missing from its stump.

  A bird flew behind him and he whipped round, ready to swing.

  ‘I need you to come with me, mate.’

  All the blood in his body dropped to his feet and he breathed out long and slow. It was Linus.

  ‘Jesus. What is it?’ He wanted to be able to sleep lying down for a long time.

  ‘I need you to come with me.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Police, mate.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ll explain on the way, mate.’

  ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘Haydon’s kid is missing.’

  Frank opened his mouth but didn’t speak. Something heavy held him on the spot, like he’d been eating sand.

  ‘We’ll take my car, eh?’ said Linus, bouncing down the stairs and dumping himself in the driver’s seat.

  Frank joined him, but in slow motion like his bones were soft and not his own. ‘How long has she been gone?’

  ‘As long as you bin away.’

  ‘What?’

  Linus kept quiet. Frank searched for something else to ask. ‘Did she run away?’

  Linus looked at him, then back at the road. ‘No one’s sure of anything yet. All that’s news is that we’ve been trying to get hold of you for as long as she’s been away.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Linus held his look in the rear-view mirror. ‘I don’t think you did it, mate. That’s why I’ve come down here. Soon as we get youse to the cops, soon as they can get some sort of alibi.’

  ‘Did what? You think I’ve got her?’ He blinked hard, tried to think. ‘This is stupid,’ he said softly.

  ‘Didn’t I just say I don’t think you did it?’ They passed by the roundabout and the boy he’d seen on that first day with the book was there at the side of the road with his back to them. ‘You’ve got to admit, though, it is a coincidence – Ian’s girl and then Sal. And you haven’t been here long.’

  ‘Do Bob and Vick think it was me?’

  Linus looked back at the road. ‘Bob and Vick don’t know which way is up. They both want to beat the living shit out of everyone.’

  Frank thought he might be sick.

  Linus wobbled the car a little, anticipating a jump from a wallaby at the side of the road. ‘Where’s your machete, Frank?’

  ‘What?’ He looked at Linus, but Linus kept his eyes on the road. ‘I don’t know! Jesus, what are you about? Machete? Fuck.’ He ground his hands into his eyes to try to make his brain work.

  ‘Where’ve you bin, then?’

  ‘I went to see my old man.’

  ‘I thought you said he was dead.’

  ‘No. That was a lie. I just haven’t seen him in a long time.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. He kept his eyes wide open, as if by really looking he might be able to work out what the hell was going on. Linus glanced at him from time to time, then looked away.

  The police officer asked all his questions as if Frank were a naughty kid. He was a man who thought highly of his own eyebrows, he seemed to think they had a touch of the dry wit about them. He repeated everything that Frank said, which made it sound less and less plausible.

  Frank wanted to smack him in the mouth. ‘I went to see my father.’

  ‘Yes, you went to see your father. His phone number?’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘You don’t know it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t know your own father’s telephone number?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I
have his address.’

  ‘You have his address, but not his telephone number?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The officer looked at the piece of bar mat June had written the address on and raised his eyebrows even further up his head. ‘Roedale? That’s a long way to get in three days.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So. If I speak to your old man. In Roedale. He. Will tell me. That you were with him. Over the last three days?’

  ‘No, look, he won’t because I didn’t see him.’

  The eyebrows went up a notch.

  ‘But I did see his wife.’

  ‘His wife? Your mother.’

  ‘Not my mother, no, his wife.’

  ‘But you did not see your father.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you did see your father’s wife – not your mother – and she will confirm that you were there for the duration?’

  ‘No.’ He put his thumbs on his temples and pushed his fingers into his forehead, his eyes closed. ‘I stopped off at a friend’s place on the way there and on the way back.’

  ‘Your friend’s number?’

  ‘I don’t have that either.’

  ‘You don’t have that either. Close friends, are you?’

  ‘We’re not really friends.’

  The officer made no comment, merely closed his eyes a second and opened them again. He disappeared off into another room shaking his head. Frank tapped his fingernails on the vinyl wood covering of the table. There were arrangements of coffee rings over the surface, playful brown bubbles. His heart was creaky in his chest. He could sleep, he could just fuck the lot of them and put his head on the table and give himself one big deep sleep.

  The policeman was gone a long time, or ten minutes, it was hard to tell which. When he returned it was with his eyebrows set in a straight line. He looked at Frank’s forehead, not his eyes. He said, ‘Can you follow me, Mr Collard?’

  Frank stood and walked quickly behind him, anxious to get things moving. Out of the interview room, Linus sat holding a paper cone of water. He nodded and Frank nodded back.

  ‘Mr Collard, I am placing you under arrest,’ the officer said.

  ‘What?’ Sand began again to be tipped into his belly. ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘For suspicion of the murder of Sal Haydon and Joyce Mackelly.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘I suspect you have, which is why I am arresting you for suspicion of murder, not for murder.’

  ‘You can’t arrest me for going away for three days.’

  The officer sighed. ‘I don’t know what small-town movies you might have seen, champ, but we’re not going to tie you to a barrel and piss on you.’

  ‘Did you ring my father?’

  ‘We did and there was no answer.’

  It occurred to him that it was Sunday. ‘They’re at church – look, they’re probably at church, they’re very religious.’

  He gave Frank a smile that was not friendly. ‘Well, if they get back from “church” and if we get an answer and it’s the answer we’re looking for, you can go. For now you are under arrest.’

  Linus shrugged. ‘Just go with it, mate,’ he said. ‘You can always get unarrested later on.’

  ‘Listen to your friend there,’ said the policeman as he placed a hand gently between Frank’s shoulder blades and guided him into another room.

  So he sat on the bed in a cell, which turned out to be pretty much just an office with a lock on the door and a bucket to pee into.

  Everything stopped and he was close to vomiting and made it to the piss bucket just in time. It wasn’t until the smell of the booze and bile of the past few days had poisoned the air in the room that he remembered Sal, and that she was gone. That the reason he was sitting in a room, puking into a bucket, was that the general opinion was that he had done to Sal whatever it was that had been done to the Mackelly girl to make her end up as just a piece of shrapnel lying in the sand.

  Sal was gone. She was small and angry and weird, and she was not there any more. He ran his hands over his face again and again. Time passed and he stayed still, trying to keep what was inside him from touching the walls of his body, trying to keep it cocooned and not thinking. But it reared again and again, Sal’s fringe in her eyes, the grub of her knees. There was no way of telling the time, he had no watch, there was no clock in the cell and no window, just a greenish electric light, like the kind you’d get in a school hallway. He watched the corners of the room for shadows but there were none. He wanted Lucy’s fingers in his hair, the way she did when he was upset, the way it gave him that guilty pleasure of feeling like a small boy.

  The door opened. Bob came in. He held his fists at his sides as rocks. His skin was pale and green like he’d been pumped full of bad water. The rims of his eyes bled. There was an open cut at the side of his neck, which stained his shirt brown.

  Frank didn’t stand up. He didn’t know if he could. He wondered if he might be sick again. Bob closed the door behind him. It was locked by someone outside. Bob looked at him, his head raised. Setting himself thickly against the door, he showed a surprising amount of muscle.

  ‘They got through to someone. Someone said you were there.’

  Frank stayed still, not feeling any relief somehow. ‘I didn’t take her, mate,’ he said softly.

  Bob nodded. ‘Someone did.’ He looked out of the window at the sun. ‘They were going to let me in here even if your alibi didn’t check out.’ He spoke slowly, like he might have just woken up. ‘I didn’t come here to apologise, I came here to tear you open.’ Bob looked sharply at him, the threat of violence in his bottom lip. ‘We’ve looked for three days non-stop. It’s been on the news – we had to do an interview. Vick had to. I couldn’t . . . you know that parents are the first suspects. Especially if they’ve had one die on them before.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mate.’

  ‘It’s like she was just picked up and taken away. It makes sense that you did something.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Why take your machete with you? Why leave without telling anyone, why leave in such a rush? You know, after you left we realised we don’t know a thing about you – we didn’t know how to find anyone who knows you. All I do know is you used to beat up your girlfriend.’

  Despite everything, the words still made Frank’s face go numb. ‘You don’t have to explain yourself, mate. It’s understandable. You’re upset.’

  ‘I’m not explaining myself, Frank. I’m convincing myself that you didn’t do it, so that I don’t come over there and tear your throat out.’ Outside someone coughed and it occurred to Frank that they might be listening in. Bob sniffed hard. ‘But I do. I believe you. It doesn’t help me, doesn’t make the slightest difference to my situation. But I believe you.’ He turned round and rested his head on the door.

  ‘I didn’t take the knife with me.’ Frank’s voice was sandy. ‘It was right outside in the stump when I left.’

  Bob lifted his head. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘It means someone else has taken it.’

  ‘Who?’ Bob’s eyes opened a fraction wider.

  ‘Maybe Sal took it with her?’

  Bob looked blank.

  ‘There’s no reason to think that something bad has happened to her. She might have just run off. She’s into all this survival stuff. How to make a fire, catch food, bivouacs. It’s all she talks about.’

  Bob was silent; as though he hadn’t heard, then he inhaled deeply again through his nose, keeping his eyes on the fluorescent light with all the shapes of dead flies in it. ‘I don’t know her very well.’

  ‘Sal?’

  ‘After Emmy died. I’ve just been shit.’

  ‘Well, a bloke could understand that.’

  ‘A seven-year-old can’t. Why should she understand it? Christ, if anything’s happened to her. If some bastard’s touched her . . . I had this idea you’d buried her in the vegetab
les. I dug in there looking for her, while the police were off somewhere. Every time I hit a bloody potato I thought, Jesus, there she is.’ Bob looked at him and shook his head.

  ‘Let me help you look.’

  In the car Frank was put through the trauma of having to smell Bob next to him. A mix of sweat, rum and sick, but then he didn’t reckon he’d be smelling that much better. Through Bob’s gaping shirt he could see dark lines on the skin of his chest, like he’d pressed himself to a large griddle pan.

  ‘Where’s Vicky?’

  ‘She’s scared Sal’ll come home while we’re out. She’s scared she won’t. She’s been doing circuits round the house, then she gets scared she won’t hear the phone ring an’ she goes back in.’

  There was nothing Frank could say, so he stayed quiet until they arrived at the shack.

  ‘We’ve been all around here. Hundred times. We’ve trawled the bush, the cane. We’ve shouted our throats bloody. Nothing. What can we do?’

  ‘Look some more.’

  Bob looked tired and Frank wished he had something better to say.

  Parts of the bush were familiar, but he wasn’t sure if they were real memories or if he just wanted to feel that he knew where he was going. Trees of a certain shape, their branches low and thick, made his pulse quicken. It was unthinkable that they wouldn’t find her. Unthinkable.